Andre Burakovsky

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

13 goals and 26 assists in 49 games — 39 points — at 16:33 a night. Minus-9, 105 shots at 12.4 per cent, four on the power play, three game-winners, 14 penalty minutes.

Thirty-nine points in forty-nine games is a 65-point pace and the best rate of a nine-year career. He missed thirty-three games.

47.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 659 minutes, the 28th percentile — the second-lowest of any Seattle forward who played six hundred minutes — with his ice at 30-30 against an expectation of 27.19-29.95.

He started 54.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 72nd percentile, which makes the 28th-percentile chance share worse rather than better.

The Finesse Game

105 shots at a median of 35 feet, which is a long way out for a scoring winger.

From twenty to forty feet: 50 shots on goal and nine goals — 18.00 per cent, against a league rate of 11.05. Inside twenty: 18 shots and four goals, 22.22, above the league forward rate of 17.71. Beyond forty: 32 shots and no goals.

Well above the rate at the two distances that matter and nothing from the third, on a hundred shots. The mid-slot figure is the one that carries the file: fifty shots from between twenty and forty feet is a lot for a man playing sixteen minutes, and nine of them went in.

147 tracked attempts, 109 of them wrist shots — a 74.1 per cent share, the highest of the 324 forwards in this book who took a hundred attempts. Six slap shots and three tip-ins.

That is an unusually pure profile: he shoots one way, from one distance, and it is the reason the goals are streaky. 91.9 mph at the 58th percentile.

A career 14.4 per cent shooting percentage across 568 games, and 12.4 last season — so the finishing is real and this was not even his best year at it.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 203 pounds, and almost none of it is used.

Top speed 22.1 mph at the 39th percentile, 1.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 66th, 2.75 miles a game at the 64th. Ordinary in every direction for a 6-3 winger.

14 penalty minutes in 49 games and 141 in 568 career games. He is not a physical player and never engages along the wall, which for a man of his size is the standing complaint against him and the reason the chance share is what it is.

The skill is in the hands and in the entry: he carries the puck into the zone cleanly and plays the game at arm’s length from contact.

The Intangibles

Twenty-third overall in 2013, nine seasons, 568 games, 334 points across Washington, Colorado and Seattle.

136 goals and a Stanley Cup with Colorado in 2022, where the three seasons produced 45, 44 and 61 points in fewer than eighty games each.

He is twenty-eight and has never played 81 games in a season. The pattern is the file: a genuinely skilled scoring winger who produces at a 65-point rate and is available for sixty games.

That combination is worth a great deal less than the rate suggests, and it is the reason a player this productive has been on three clubs by twenty-eight.